NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

3% Growth, If We Can Keep It Trump tariffs, the Fed and a Pelosi Congress pose risks to growth.

Posted By on October 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/3-growth-if-we-can-keep-it-1540595205

Can economic growth from tax reform and deregulation stand up to the headwinds from higher interest rates, tariffs and perhaps a Democratic Congress? That’s the question we take away from Friday’s strong but somewhat disappointing report on economic growth in the third quarter. The answer isn’t obvious.

The Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at a robust 3.5% in the third quarter, a mild slowdown from 4.2% in the second. Consumer spending led the way with a 4% increase rooted in a tight job market and wage gains that have bolstered economic confidence. The economy has now grown by 3% over the last 12 months.

The U.S. economy hasn’t grown at 3% in a calendar year since 2005, and that is now achievable this year. Barack Obama has recently been claiming credit for this faster growth as he campaigns for Democrats, but that boast is right up there with his promise that if you like your health plan you can keep it.

It’s clear that the Republican policy mix of tax reform, deregulation and general encouragement for risk-taking rescued an expansion that was fading fast and almost fell into recession in the last six quarters of the Obama Administration. The nearby chart tells the story that Mr. Obama and his economists won’t admit. Soaring business and consumer confidence have been central to this rebound.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli Leader Visits Oman’s Ruler in Sign of Improving Relations Netanyahu and Sultan Qaboos meet for the first time to discuss regional stability By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-leader-visits-omans-ruler-in-sign-of-improving-relations-1540575081

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a surprise visit to meet Oman’s ruler this week to discuss regional issues, the first official summit between the leaders and a sign of improving relations between Israel and the Arab Gulf states.

Mr. Netanyahu returned from Oman on Friday afternoon after meeting Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, the Israeli leader’s office said in a statement. He was accompanied by his wife, Sara, and several senior Israeli officials including the head of the country’s spy agency, Yossi Cohen. A brief statement released by Oman said the meeting between the two leaders took place on Thursday.

Israel has no formal diplomatic relations with Oman or its Arab Gulf neighbors. But boosting ties, particularly on the basis of a shared interest in countering regional rival Iran, has been a priority for Mr. Netanyahu as prime minister. Israel shares some intelligence information with Arab Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., according to current and former American and Israeli officials. But cooperation has remained tacit absent a resolution to the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said the visit is a significant step toward his goal “of deepening relations with the states of the region while leveraging Israel’s advantages in security, technology and economic matters.”

The Trump administration welcomed the visit and described it as useful to its effort to bring about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

World’s oldest intact shipwreck discovered in Black Sea Archaeologists say the 23-metre vessel has lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years Kevin Rawlinson

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-bottom-of-black-sea
Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea where it appears to have lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years.

The 23-metre (75ft) vessel, thought to be ancient Greek, was discovered with its mast, rudders and rowing benches all present and correct just over a mile below the surface. A lack of oxygen at that depth preserved it, the researchers said.

“A ship surviving intact from the classical world, lying in over 2km of water, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the principal investigator with the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (MAP), the team that made the find. “This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and seafaring in the ancient world.”

The ship is believed to have been a trading vessel of a type that researchers say has only previously been seen “on the side of ancient Greek pottery such as the ‘Siren Vase’ in the British Museum”.

That work, which dates from about the same period, depicts a similar vessel bearing Odysseus past the sirens, with the Homeric hero lashed to the mast to resist their songs.

The team reportedly said they intended to leave the vessel where it was found, but added that a small piece had been carbon dated by the University of Southampton and claimed the results “confirmed [it] as the oldest intact shipwreck known to mankind”. The team said the data would be published at the Black Sea MAP conference at the Wellcome Collection in London later this week.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Roger Franklin What Fun! The NYTimes Killing of Donald Trump

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/fun-killing-donald-trump/

It goes without saying the mainstream US media would immediately blame the wave of letter bombs on Donald Trump, whose words are said to have whipped some right-wing loon into action. But when the Times imagines the assassination of the president, that’s fine and dandy.

In the United States just now, a spate of what appear to be rather amateurish letter bombs has been turning up in the mailboxes of prominent Trump critics. These have been widely bemoaned, not least by CNN, which blamed the evacuation of its New York office on — yes, you guessed it — the coarsening of public life for which the low-rated cable network blames — yes, you guessed that too — Donald J. Trump.

Even as Lower Manhattan came to a halt yesterday, when another of the bombs arrived at the TriBeCa eatery of actor Robert DeNiro, who famously expressed a desire to punch Trump in the face, the Times handed a slice of its op-ed page to Alexander Soros, son of the infamous George, for another Trump-bashing. In a further op-ed prompted by the pipe bombs, author and abortion advocate Eyal Press writes:

… it is Mr. Trump who has called journalists “scum” and “enemies of the people” … These are just words, some would say…

Accept as a given that anything Trump says or does will be the butt of criticism. Were he to cure cancer, the Times could be expected to lambast him for putting nurses out of work. Thus are the pipe bombs his doing because, as Press suggests, “just words” aren’t just words at all.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Andrew McCabe, the Deep State henchman By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/andrew_mccabe_the_deep_state_henchman.html

The process by which the FBI and Department of Justice were corrupted into serving as political attack machines for the Democrats is finally coming into focus. In an article in The Hill that is today’s read of the day, a retired senior FBI executive puts together the evidence already on the record to offer a roadmap of how the politicization of these powerful bureaucracies was accomplished.

Kevin R. Brock, who is identified as “former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),” sees Andrew McCabe as the point man, pulled up through the career bureaucracy of the bureau by his mentor, James Comey, who was, after all, an outsider political appointee in need of a henchman to implement his political machinations. Once Comey was fired, McCabe became the key figure leading the law enforcement branch of the Deep State’s resistance to Trump.

This is an article that deserves to be read in full, but here are a couple of tidbits to entice you, demonstrating the wit and experience that Brock brings to the subject.

According to FBI executives, Comey personally fast-tracked McCabe’s career into the deputy director position. McCabe was not happy that the president fired his boss and that Rosenstein provided the ammo.

Comey, who has urged America to vote Democrat, apparently liked what he saw in McCabe, who was overseeing the Clinton email investigation in the Washington Field Office, even though his wife, a Democratic candidate for Virginia Senate, had accepted over $1 million bundled together by longtime Clinton loyalist Terry McAuliffe for her campaign just two weeks prior to the 2015 election that she lost.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Stopping the Caravan By Mark Krikorian

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/stopping-the-caravan/Only Congress can fix this.

Can we stop the caravan?

As Rod Dreher notes, the sight of thousands of Central Americans making their way en masse to the United States forces us to ask: “How far would we go to defend the sovereignty of our nations from invaders who want to cross our borders not with weapons to conquer, but nevertheless to settle here?”

The president’s threat to deploy the military to the border to stop the caravan conjures images of gunning down unarmed border infiltrators. This is precisely the kind of confrontation that some of the radicals cheering the caravan would love to see.

But this isn’t a military problem. It’s a law-enforcement problem, and one that ordinary civilian law enforcement can solve if provided with the right tools — which it does not have right now. The current rules regarding asylum and the treatment of alien minors, and the inadequate level of funding for detention of people applying for asylum (to make sure they can’t run off when their cases are rejected), effectively force immigration authorities into a catch-and-release policy, where aliens crossing the border are given a court date and then let go. This is a powerful incentive for more people to follow.

The incentive is so powerful that the current caravan is just the most photogenic part of the problem; fiscal-year 2018 statistics show that a slow-motion caravan confronts the border every day, with a daily average in September of more than 500 illegal aliens traveling in family units apprehended on the border (and soon released). Many others walk up to an immigration inspector at a legal crossing point on the Mexican border (“port of entry” is the technical term) and simply utter the magic word “asylum” and get in.

What to do? Deploying troops won’t do any good because they can’t arrest people; it would be just like the National Guard deployments under the Bush, Obama, and current administrations, where troops assisted the Border Patrol in reconnaissance and the like, which is fine as far as it goes but doesn’t solve anything. And they’re obviously not going to open fire on unarmed people. Even land mines and machines guns atop concrete border walls wouldn’t matter much, since most of those arriving would simply go to a legal port of entry. (About one-third of last spring’s caravan actually made it all the way to the border, and of those, the large majority went to ports of entry.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

European Human-Rights Court: Defaming Muhammad Not Protected Speech By Jack Crowe

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/european-human-rights-court-defaming-muhammad-not-protected/

Defamatory statements about the prophet Muhammad are not covered by free-speech protections, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday.

The Strasbourg-based court found that insulting the prophet “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.”

In its ruling, the court rejected an Austrian woman’s claim that her previous conviction for characterizing Muhammad as a “pedophile” violated her free-speech rights, finding instead that the Austrian court had “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”

In a series of public seminars, the women cited Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old girl, which, according to Islamic lore, was consummated when she was nine, as evidence of his pedophilia.

Muhammad “liked to do it with children,” the woman said during one of the seminars. “A 56-year-old and a 6-year-old? . . . What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mad Cows and Hate Crimes By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/scotland-government-anti-hate-campaign-virtue-signals/

The Scottish government aims to protect people from real harm and also from those dreadful haters who might participate in wrongthink.

My blood is no use in America. What I mean is, as a native of the British Isles, born amid an epidemic of “mad cow” disease, I am theoretically a carrier of this brain-wasting affliction and, accordingly, forbidden from donating my sanguine elixir to U.S. blood banks — on the off chance it’s madly bad (or is that badly mad?).

At first, I thought this rather far-fetched. But when my visiting mother presented me with the Scotsman from last Friday — front page: “four cattle have been slaughtered in efforts to contain the first case of ‘mad cow’ disease in Scotland in a decade” — I reconsidered.

Incidentally, there is a strange quirk in Scots law protecting the bovine. According to the Licensing Act of 1872, it remains illegal to be drunk and in possession of a cow. But I digress. The Scotsman report reassured: “Authorities have said the public should not worry as no infected meat entered the food chain.”

Of course, this slaughter, like restrictive blood donation, is a precautionary measure intended to protect the general public from risk of serious harm. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but it is an important one by way of contrast.

Picture this, if you will: The Reverend David Robertson, a Protestant minister at St. Peter’s Free Church in Dundee and author of the delightful TheWeeFlea blog, was riding his bicycle through the lively Scottish city when one of the following signs caught his attention.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War For The West Historian Ben MacIntyre’s new book, ‘The Spy and the Traitor,’ tells the thrilling story of how the KGB’s Oleg Gordievsky helped check the Soviet Union as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan fought communism.By Tony Daniel

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/how-a-kgb-double-agent-saved-britain-won-the-cold-war-for-the-west/

In his new book The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, veteran espionage historian Ben MacIntyre confirms a troubling decision—or lack thereof—that some had suspected for years. This is the fact that in 1983 the man overseeing both British spy services MI6 and MI5, head of British Civil Service Robert Armstrong, knew that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s main opponent in the upcoming election was a KGB agent and did not tell her.

Labor Party leader, member of Parliament, and former employment secretary Michael Foot had been a paid KGB agent for decades, and was still on the KGB books as an agent of influence when he headed the British Labor Party and ran against Thatcher for leadership of England in 1983. Foot would have become prime minister if Labor had won.

MI6 told MI5, its domestic sister agency, and MI5 told Armstrong, but Armstrong kept Foot’s duplicity to himself. Nobody informed Thatcher. According to MacIntyre:

[Armstrong] did not tell Margaret Thatcher or her other top advisers; he did not tell anyone in the Civil Service, the Conservative Party, or the Labour Party. He did not tell the Americans, or any other of Britain’s allies. He did not tell a soul. Having been passed the unexploded bomb, the cabinet secretary put it in his pocket, and kept it there, in the hope that Foot would lose, and the problem would defuse itself. [MI6 operative] Veronica Price was blunt: ‘We buried it.’

With what seems in hindsight a misguided sense of higher duty and a display of undemocratic arrogance, Armstrong put the British Commonwealth in the position of possibly electing a genuine KGB agent as prime minister—a fact its intelligence services knew and did nothing about. MacIntyre confirms this state of affairs from multiple sources. Thankfully, Thatcher and the Tories won in 1983.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What We Know About The Suspected Package Bomb Sender So Far By Bre Payton

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/know-suspected-package-bomb-sender-far/

A man has been arrested in connection to the packaged bombs sent to prominent Democratic leaders Friday morning. Authorities say DNA evidence linked 56-year-old Cesar Altieri Sayoc, of Florida, to the dozen packages with explosive devices sent earlier this week to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Joe Biden, CNN contributor John Brennan, among others, CBS news reports.

A van reportedly confiscated by the FBI that is believed to belong to Sayoc displayed numerous decals depicting targets on liberal leaders, including Clinton. Sayoc reportedly used to work as a stripper and “lived like a gypsy,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“He really couldn’t find his niche in life, and I guess he found it now,” Sayoc’s former employer Tony Valentine told the Examiner. “Back in the ’90s, he was running around from Minnesota to the Carolinas to Florida. He was like a gypsy.”

Sayoc is a registered Republican who has been arrested numerous times, including an arrest in 2002 for attempting to use a bomb. NBC News reports Sayoc was living out of his van and showering at the gym. A cousin of the suspect called him “a lost soul,” according to The Guardian.

“He’s been in the strip clubs since he was 22, that was his life,” the relative told The Guardian. “He was a male dancer and he wanted to be a wrestler. He was taking steroids. He was all buffed up….He was built like a rock.”

Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie claims Sayoc threatened her via Twitter after she appeared on Fox News.